A Guide to the I. J. Schoenberg Papers,
1900-1993

Consists of
correspondence, manuscripts of published and unpublished papers and lectures,
research notes, teaching materials, and photographs documenting the career of mathematician
Isaac Jacob Schoenberg.

Accession No.

91-3

Extent

26 ft.

Language

Materials are written in English,
Russian, French, Dutch, German,
and Romanian.

Isaac "Iso" Jacob Schoenberg (1903-1990) was born in Galatz, Romania,
and received his Ph.D. from the University of Jassy [Iasi] in Moldavia in 1926.
He came to the United States in 1930 on a Rockefeller fellowship where he
served as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Chicago and Harvard
University. In 1933 he became a member of the Institute for Advanced Study at
Princeton (1933-1935). His major mathematical teaching posts were at the
University of Pennsylvania (1941-1966) and the University of Wisconsin-Madison
(1966-1973). He was released from work at the University of Pennsylvania from
1943-1945 to work at the Army's Ballistic Research Laboratory in Aberdeen,
Maryland, where he began his work on the theory of splines. Other research
interests of Schoenberg include Pólya frequency functions and cardinal
splines.

Consists of correspondence, manuscripts of published and unpublished
papers, lectures, research notes, and teaching materials documenting the career
of mathematician Isaac Jacob Schoenberg. The collection includes correspondence
with a number of notable mathematicians, including Edmund Landau, J.R. Kline,
Paul Erdös, and George Pólya. There are also materials documenting Schoenberg’s
personal and family life, most notably correspondence showing Schoenberg’s
attempts to help family and friends immigrate to Israel and the United States
prior to the outbreak of World War II. Mathematical subject matter includes
research notes, lectures, drafts on analysis, approximation theory, and
splines.

Gurney, Ronald, “Selected extracts from some of the
letters sent to Natalie Gurney by personal friend and scientific colleagues of
her husband, Ronald W. Gurney, --after his sudden death in New York, --April
14, 1953, undated